🩳 Relax – It’s Sunday – August 23 2020

It’s Sunday. Even though we’re on vacation for a few days we wanted to get a Sunday newsletter out to all of you who referred your friends. Remember this Sunday edition is only hitting your inbox if you’ve referred 3 friends. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. Now I’m going back to the pool, I’m trying to finish this Jack Reacher novel.

Coronavirus Update: Total confirmed U.S. cases as of 3 a.m. ET: 5,668,245 — Total deaths: 176,362 — Total recoveries:  1,985,484

South Korea reenters lockdown after a spike in infections.

In Today’s Newsletter:

• Postal emergency
• Facebook considers a kill switch
• Back to school means lost wages

Sunday Deep Dive: The House Tells Trump to Lick Its Stamps

credit: getty

The House of Representatives passed a $25 billion bill to give emergency funding to the US Postal Service. That sounds great but the bill is unlikely to pass the Senate.

The Delivering For America Act would:

• Give extra cash to the struggling federal service
• Rollback recent changes to the Postal Service
• Replace the mail sorting machines and drop boxes that have been removed in recent weeks.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said that the post office would no longer make any new changes to the service before the election but he will not put back any of the removed machines or boxes.

The Post Office bill should have been a softball. No honest lawmaker should be for kneecapping the mail in advance of an election. The President has indicated that if the bill passed both chambers, he would veto it. The Senate does not seem interested in this as a stand-alone measure but perhaps it will open discussion for another COVID stimulus package since those discussions have stalled out during the end-of-summer break.

Now what?

So what happens now? No one knows. The Senate could ignore this bill complete with an Out of Office reply. Or they could come to the table with some edits to the bill that would allow it to pass. House Democrats have said that they would meet in the middle for the stimulus package so they are waiting by the phone.

DeJoy meanwhile will testify in front of the House of Representatives again on Monday. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he’s not going to have a pleasant Sunday.

Can The Fed Save Us?
credit: getty

Financial experts have come to expect nothing from congress so this week they turn to the Federal Reserve head Jerome Powell who will speak on Thursday at the annual Jackson Hole symposium.

This year the event will be virtual. Powell is expected to discuss the Fed’s policy plan as it relates to the current crisis.

Since the market tumbled in the spring, the Fed has cut interest rates and kept them at 0. It also bought Treasury securities and mortgages and helped lending programs to keep things moving. Now that the stock market seems to have rebounded – for now – the pressure is off the Fed a bit but they are still expected to have a plan for all possible scenarios.

News By The Numbers

credit: george and kellyanne conway, nytimes

15. That’s the age of Claudia Conway the daughter of Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway and Lincoln Project founder George Conway. Conway has had it with her parents and their politics. She said on Twitter last night that she is “pushing for emancipation” from her family.

Claudia posted: “I’m officially pushing for emancipation. buckle up because this is probably going to be public one way or another, unfortunately. welcome to my life…

I’m devasted [sic] that my mother is actually speaking at the RNC. like DEVASTATED beyond compare…”

1,071. Italy’s health ministry on Saturday reported 1,071 new coronavirus infections in the past 24 hours, exceeding 1,000 cases in a day for the first time since May when the government eased rigid lockdown measures.

54%.  That’s the percentage of parents who say they’re going to lose 50% of their income when their kids go back to school. That jaw-dropping number is according to a new survey from Debt.com.

According to the survey, less than 10% of parents said they were “not worried at all” about their children’s health if they go back to school while 50% said they were “very worried.”

The Facebook Trump Switch

credit: giphy

Facebook is planning a “kill switch” in the event that President Trump loses the November election and tries to use the social network to delegitimize the results. YouTube and Twitter also have discussed similar options.

These companies have come up with several scenarios in the event our democracy is undermined, such as the removal of posts about mail-in ballots or groups that supposedly interfered with the election. The “kill switch” would turn off political ads, which have been used to great effect to spread misinformation in recent years. Many people are calling for Facebook to not wait and just do that now! Political ad revenue is not a significant part of Facebook’s revenue and it has proven to be very damaging to the electorate. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been loathe to do that but is now staring down the possibility that he just might have to.

Lightning Fast Internet

credit: giphy

How is your internet speed? Researchers at the University College London have created the fastest internet ever measured, with the ability to download all of Netflix in just one second.

The data was transmitted at 178 terabytes per second, twice the speed of any current network and one fifth faster than any previously measured network. This was done by using more colors to transmit data through fiber networks.

Don’t call your cable company and ask for these speeds though. This was a university experiment, not an option on your plan. Building out a network like this would be quite costly. But it’s fun to think about a life without swirly balls of wait time for downloads!

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